I read a couple of articles on TechRepublic by Marco Fioretti re: pipe menus used for more than just accessing applications. The first showed four or his favorites; imap mailbox checker, current month calendar, weather forecast, and system monitor. The article also contained links to a site with additional menu scripts. The second contained instructions on writing your own pipe menus for Fluxbox, Blackbox, OpenBox, etc. I have not used Mint's Xfce, but I guess this applies to it and the LXDE edition as well as the FluxBox edition.

The mention of Fluxbox was in the article and from the wording I extrapolated it to the second article.

My favourite solution for this type of problem is to run some descendant of the Blackbox window manager like Fluxbox or Openbox, properly equipped with a tool that is, in my opinion, really cool and made on purpose to answer the question above: pipe menus. Therefore, here I will explain what pipe menus are and show, as real world examples, the four ones I like the best. I will do this with Openbox, but the rest of this post is valid with little or no modifications for its cousins too.